Augmented Technology Research Articles

Braided Environments. A Call to Explore Rhetoric and Materiality through Augmentative Technologies

Braided Environments. A Call to Explore Rhetoric and Materiality through Augmentative Technologies

Augmented reality virtual glasses try-on technology based on iOS platform

With the development of e-commerce, network virtual try-on, as a new online shopping mode, fills the gap that the goods cannot be tried on in traditional online shopping. In the work, we discussed augmented reality virtual glasses try-on technology on iOS platform to achieve optimal purchase of online glasses, improving try-on speed of virtual glasses, user senses of reality, and immersion. Face information was collected by the input device-monocular camera. After face detection by SVM classifier, the local face features were extracted by robust SIFT. Combined with SDM, the feature points were iteratively solved to obtain more accurate feature point alignment model. Through the head pose estimation, the virtual model was accurately superimposed on the human face, thus realizing the try-on of virtual glasses. The above research was applied in iOS glasses try-on APP system to design the try-on system of augmented reality virtual glasses on iOS mobile platform. It is proved that the method can achieve accurate identification of face features and quick try-on of virtual glasses.

Potential Mechanisms of Sensory Augmentation Systems on Human Balance Control.

Numerous studies have demonstrated the real-time use of visual, vibrotactile, auditory, and multimodal sensory augmentation technologies for reducing postural sway during static tasks and improving balance during dynamic tasks. The mechanism by which sensory augmentation information is processed and used by the CNS is not well understood. The dominant hypothesis, which has not been supported by rigorous experimental evidence, posits that observed reductions in postural sway are due to sensory reweighting: feedback of body motion provides the CNS with a correlate to the inputs from its intact sensory channels (e.g., vision, proprioception), so individuals receiving sensory augmentation learn to increasingly depend on these intact systems. Other possible mechanisms for observed postural sway reductions include: cognition (processing of sensory augmentation information is solely cognitive with no selective adjustment of sensory weights by the CNS), “sixth” sense (CNS interprets sensory augmentation information as a new and distinct sensory channel), context-specific adaptation (new sensorimotor program is developed through repeated interaction with the device and accessible only when the device is used), and combined volitional and non-volitional responses. This critical review summarizes the reported sensory augmentation findings spanning postural control models, clinical rehabilitation, laboratory-based real-time usage, and neuroimaging to critically evaluate each of the aforementioned mechanistic theories. Cognition and sensory re-weighting are identified as two mechanisms supported by the existing literature.

Anaerobic treatment of opaque beer wastewater with enhanced biogas recovery through Acti-zyme bio augmentation

This study investigates the potentially of biologically treating opaque beer wastewater using the bio augmentation technology at the same time harnessing biogas and bio solids as value added products. Wastewater sample were collected in 5L containers and the sludge was separated from the liquid. The liquid and sludge were bio augmented with Acti-zyme with loadings of 5 g/L, 10 g/L and 15 g/L and were left to settle over a period of 30 days under anaerobic conditions. The wastewater and treated effluent BOD, COD, TKN, TP, TSS, TDS and pH were measured using standard methods. Whereas the amount of biogas generated was measured using the water displacement and its composition quantified. The BOD, COD, TKN, TP, TSS, TDS were significantly reduced by 93%, 77%, 87%, 89%, 90% and 90% respectively. The BOD/COD ratio was 0.72 initially and reduced to 0.21 for all the Acti-zyme loadings. Biogas with a methane composition of 65–70% was recovered.

A Needs Assessment of People with Hearing Impairment for Hearing Augmentation Technology Development: Focusing on Risk Context Awareness Communication

본 연구의 목적은 청각장애인이 경험하는 위험상황과 청각 대체기술로 사용하는 보조기기 사용실태를 조사하여 청각증강 기술 개발의 적용점을 모색하는 데 있다. 이를 위해 청각장애 등급을 판정받은 청각장애인을 대상으로 설문조사하여 총 355명의 자료를 분석에 사용하였다. 연구결과 첫째, 소리 및 진동을 인지한 경험이 없는 상황으로 교통수단, 사물, 자연 영역 순으로 높게 나타났다. 이 중 교통수단의 소리와 진동을 인지하지 못한 비율이 높아 일상생활에서 청각장애인이 경험하는 위험 가능성이 높은 것으로 조사되었다. 둘째, 청각장애인이 경험한 위험상황은 교통사고, 보행사고, 가정에서의 일상생활 순으로 높게 조사되었다. 셋째, 위험상황 인식과 알림을 위한 보조기기로 2G폰/스마트폰, 진동디지털알람시계, 경광등, 진동손목시계의 인지도가 높았으며, 2G폰/스마트폰의 만족도가 가장 높았다. 넷째, 의사소통을 위한 보조기기로 보청기, 스마트폰, 영상전화기, 인공와우, 2G폰 순으로 인지도가 높았으며, 스마트폰을 사용하였을 경우 만족도와 의사소통 개선정도가 가장 높게 조사되었다. 마지막으로 청각증강 기술 개발을 위해 고려할 점으로 휴대/착용 편의성, 가격, 동작 정확도 순으로 선호하였으며, 알림 전달 방식은 시각(문자와 빛)을 활용한 알림방식을 선호하였다. 연구결과에 근거하여 위험상황에서 청각장애인의 청각증강 기술 개발을 위한 정책적, 실천적 방안을 제시하였다.The purpose of this study is to find the application point of hearing augmentation technology development through examining the risk context experience of people with hearing impairment and the use of assistive device used as an alternative technology. Data of 355 people with hearing impairment with official disability grading was analyzed. The results of this study are first, research participants had no experience of recognizing any sound or vibration in situations highest in the order of means of transportation, material, and nature. Especially the ratio of being unable to recognize the sound and vibration of means of transportation was high, which implies the high possibility of people with hearing impairment experiencing risk. Secondly, the risk context that people with hearing impairment will most likely to experience are highest in the order of traffic accident, pedestrian accident, and daily life at home. Thirdly, the recognition of 2G phone/smart phone, vibrating digital alarm clock, light bar, vibrating wrist watch as assistive device for risk context awareness and notification was high and the satisfaction level of 2G phone/smart phone was the highest. Fourthly, the research participants had high recognition of assistive device for communication in the order of hearing aid, smart phone, videophone, cochlear implant and 2G phone and it was found that the satisfaction level and communication improvement level was the highest using the smart phone. Lastly, for the development of hearing augmentation technology the research participants recognized the importance of portable/wear convenience, price, and motion accuracy and for notification delivery means they preferred the method of using sight(text and light). Based on the results of this study policy and practical plans for hearing augmentation technology development for people with hearing impairment in risk context are proposed.

GesID: 3D Gesture Authentication Based on Depth Camera and One-Class Classification.

Biometric authentication is popular in authentication systems, and gesture as a carrier of behavior characteristics has the advantages of being difficult to imitate and containing abundant information. This research aims to use three-dimensional (3D) depth information of gesture movement to perform authentication with less user effort. We propose an approach based on depth cameras, which satisfies three requirements: Can authenticate from a single, customized gesture; achieves high accuracy without an excessive number of gestures for training; and continues learning the gesture during use of the system. To satisfy these requirements respectively: We use a sparse autoencoder to memorize the single gesture; we employ data augmentation technology to solve the problem of insufficient data; and we use incremental learning technology for allowing the system to memorize the gesture incrementally over time. An experiment has been performed on different gestures in different user situations that demonstrates the accuracy of one-class classification (OCC), and proves the effectiveness and reliability of the approach. Gesture authentication based on 3D depth cameras could be achieved with reduced user effort.

Kultura informacji osób z niepełnosprawnością wzroku w refleksji tyflologiczno-informatologicznej

The subject of this paper is the specificity of the information space of persons with visual disabilities as a component of their information culture, according to the concept proposed by M. Kisilowska. Based on systematic analysis of documents and long years of participative observations, the deliberations focus on legal solutions governing the access of persons with visual disabilities to information, the navigation and cognition spheres of a blind information user and the specificity of providing information, in particular the Braille system, tactile graphics, audio description, alternative materials and augmentative technologies. The deliberations highlight obstacles in accessing information by persons with visual disabilities and suggest both practical solutions and research proposals for a complex analysis of the information culture of persons with visual disabilities in Poland.

Augmented Reality and Crowdsourced Feedback to Help Learners Navigate Self-Access Materials

Learning is a life-long activity which neither begins nor ends with a learner’s time in formal educational environments. Many learners, however, have difficulty efficiently managing their own learning processes, and this includes knowledgeably selecting effective learning materials, particularly in skill-focused areas such as within language learning. Increasingly, self-access centers and other non-traditional learning environments act as a bridge between formal education and opportunities for life-long learning. This paper details a mobile app called Peer Scan, including what it is, these needs it was developed to address, decisions in the development process, and how it can be used by learners in self-access learning environments to help them select appropriate learning materials. The design and development of the app is meant to alleviate some of the difficulties faced by students in self-access centers in Japan in selecting effective materials. The ongoing design seeks to eliminate friction and barriers to use to support uptake, harnessing augmented reality object recognition technology to do so. Peer Scan is designed to allow learners to both see peer assessments of materials as an immediate means of support, and also to implicitly develop useful inner criteria for material selection that can aid them later as life-long learners.

THE SECURITY AND PRIVACY PROBLEMS OF AUGMENTED REALITY TECHNOLOGIES

The analysis of security and confidential problems, connected with augmented reality systems and support technologies have been conducted. These problems have been analyzed using 2 categories: system volume and functionality. In the first category the augmented reality systems (AR-systems) of growing scale: single applications, multiple applications within a single AR platform, and multiple communicating AR-systems have been reviewed. For this category the problems connected with input, output and data access have been analyzed. Based on the described problems of information security in AR-technologies, the main directions of their solutions have been indicated.

The optical flow detection method of moving target using deep convolution neural network

Moving target detection is an important research direction of object detection, and it plays an important role in target recognition. The accuracy of traditional motion detection methods is low, which are unable to only detect the required moving target. In this study, deep convolutional neural network is introduced into the optical flow detection of moving target. In this method, a pair of images and optical flow fields of target are used as inputs of the network to adaptively study the target optical flow. Furthermore, through optimization of the expanding part of the network and the simplification of the network, and combined with many data augmentation technologies, the optical flow detection network of target object with both accuracy and real-time is designed. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance in the optical flow detection of moving target. SS-sp and CS-sp network are improved by about 5.0% compared to the original network on the precision and the runtime of the network is significantly reduced, which meet the requirements of real-time detection.

Individualized Biventricular Epicardial Augmentation Technology in a Drug-Induced Porcine Failing Heart Model.

For treatment of advanced heart failure, current strategies include cardiac transplantation or blood-contacting pump technology associated with complications, including stroke and bleeding. This study investigated an individualized biventricular epicardial augmentation technology in a drug-induced porcine failing heart model. A total of 11 pigs were used, for the assessment of hemodynamics and cardiac function under various conditions of support pressures and support durations (n = 4), to assess device positioning and function by in vivo computer tomographic imaging (n = 3) and to investigate a minimally invasive implantation on the beating heart (n = 4). Support pressures of 20-80 mm Hg gradually augmented cardiac function parameters in this animal model as indicated by increased left ventricular stroke volume, end-systolic pressures, and decreased end-diastolic pressures. Strong evidence was found regarding the necessity of mechanical synchronization of support end with the isovolumetric relaxation phase of the heart. In addition, the customized, self-expandable implant enabled a marker-guided minimally invasive implantation through a 4 cm skin incision using fluoroscopy. Correct positioning was confirmed in computer tomographic images. Continued long-term survival investigations will deliver preclinical evidence for further development of this concept.

Augmented Flavours: Modulation of Flavour Experiences Through Electric Taste Augmentation

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the potential benefits and new applications that may be afforded by incorporating digital flavour augmentation technologies into traditional eating and drinking experiences. Although many studies have shown how controlled olfactory, visual and auditory cues can impact flavour experiences, there has been a relatively small amount of work that has investigated the utilisation of digital gustatory (taste) augmentation in the same context. Hence, we have created two utensils, a pair of chopsticks and a soup bowl, that apply controlled electrical pulses to the tip of the tongue during consumption in order to augment flavours through electrical stimulation. As such, in this paper we present a study that aimed to evaluate the impact of electric taste augmentation on two types of eating experiences: consuming mashed potato and miso soup. Based on this study, our findings demonstrate that 1) significant increases in perceived saltiness and sourness can be achieved when consuming unsalted mashed potato and 2) significantly higher ratings of sourness can be achieved when consuming diluted miso soup.

Augmenting Humans on the Slope: Two Electronic Devices That Enhance Safety and Decision Making

In contrast to many other outdoor sports, skiing and snowboarding always entail the use of a significant amount of gear. This makes mountain slopes an ideal test bed for trialing novel augmentation technologies. Consumer electronics, such as smart watches, smartphones, and head-up displays, present a great opportunity for augmenting one's perception and communication capabilities on the slopes, e.g., for improving piste safety and the overall experience of decision making and coordination when practicing winter sports.

AUGMENTED REALITY AS A MEDIUM OF GAMIFICATION OF CONSUMPTION IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL VILLAGE

In today's world the differences between the virtual and real have fairly diminished. In this context, the virtual reality systems, which are the new means of communication and have the characteristic qualifications of new media technologies, have changed the one way communication model of traditional media. As a result of this transformation of the communication model, the user has begun to interact with the content producers. Therefore, the user is transformed from the passive role to the active role and continues his/her life in a two-way communication model. In this way, virtual environments, which the so called new media technology devices has brought in, made it possible for the users to control and interact with interfaces and this made it easy to send the message from the source to the target. The communication notion stands in the basis of the technology, which is produced for consuming; also it forms a basis for new media technologies like virtual reality. Especially gamification of consumption and by this way increasing the consuming behavior, this technology is the frontier of continuously improving new media technologies. In this context, in this study Huizinga’s game notion is related with augmented technology and IKEA’s augmented technology is examined.

Co-creation and Risk-Taking—In Pursuit of New Technology for Human Augmentation: An Interview with Pranav Mistry

Marc Langheinrich and Nigel Davies interview Pranav Mistry, Global Senior Vice President of Research at Samsung, about his views on the field of human augmentation.

Wearable Assistive Technologies for Autism: Opportunities and Challenges

Autism is a lifelong developmental condition that affects how people perceive the world and interact with others. Challenges with typical social engagement, common in the autism experience, can have a significant negative impact on the quality of life of individuals and families living with autism. Recent advances in sensing, intelligent, and interactive technologies can enable new forms of assistive and augmentative technologies to support social interactions. However, researchers have not yet demonstrated effectiveness of these technologies in long-term real-world use. This article presents an overview of the social and sensory challenges of autism, which offer great opportunities and challenges for the design and development of assistive technologies. We review existing work on developing wearable technologies for autism particularly to assist social interactions, analyze their potential and limitations, and discuss future research directions.

Artificial limb representation in amputees.

The human brain contains multiple hand-selective areas, in both the sensorimotor and visual systems. Could our brain repurpose neural resources, originally developed for supporting hand function, to represent and control artificial limbs? We studied individuals with congenital or acquired hand-loss (hereafter one-handers) using functional MRI. We show that the more one-handers use an artificial limb (prosthesis) in their everyday life, the stronger visual hand-selective areas in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex respond to prosthesis images. This was found even when one-handers were presented with images of active prostheses that share the functionality of the hand but not necessarily its visual features (e.g. a 'hook' prosthesis). Further, we show that daily prosthesis usage determines large-scale inter-network communication across hand-selective areas. This was demonstrated by increased resting state functional connectivity between visual and sensorimotor hand-selective areas, proportional to the intensiveness of everyday prosthesis usage. Further analysis revealed a 3-fold coupling between prosthesis activity, visuomotor connectivity and usage, suggesting a possible role for the motor system in shaping use-dependent representation in visual hand-selective areas, and/or vice versa. Moreover, able-bodied control participants who routinely observe prosthesis usage (albeit less intensively than the prosthesis users) showed significantly weaker associations between degree of prosthesis observation and visual cortex activity or connectivity. Together, our findings suggest that altered daily motor behaviour facilitates prosthesis-related visual processing and shapes communication across hand-selective areas. This neurophysiological substrate for prosthesis embodiment may inspire rehabilitation approaches to improve usage of existing substitutionary devices and aid implementation of future assistive and augmentative technologies.

A novel approach to generate a large scale of supervised data for short text sentiment analysis

As for the complexity of language structure, the semantic structure, and the relative scarcity of labeled data and context information, sentiment analysis has been regarded as a challenging task in Natural Language Processing especially in the field of short-text processing. Deep learning model need a large scale of training data to overcome data sparseness and the over-fitting problem, we propose multi-granularity text-oriented data augmentation technologies to generate large-scale artificial data for training model, which is compared with Generative adversarial network(GAN). In this paper, a novel hybrid neural network model architecture(LSCNN) was proposed with our data augmentation technology, which is can outperforms many single neural network models. The proposed data augmentation method enhances the generalization ability of the proposed model. Experiment results show that the proposed data augmentation method in combination with the neural networks model can achieve astonishing performance without any handcrafted features on sentiment analysis or short text classification. It was validated on a Chinese on-line comment dataset and Chinese news headline corpus, and outperforms many state-of-the-art models. Evidence shows that the proposed data argumentation technology can obtain more accurate distribution representation from data for deep learning, which improves the generalization characteristics of the extracted features. The combination of the data argumentation technology and LSCNN fusion model is well suited to short text sentiment analysis, especially on small scale corpus.

Heat-transfer augmentation techniques to improve seal life

This article looks at several heat-transfer augmentation technologies that have been developed at Louisiana State University's Center for Rotating Machinery. Aimed at reducing interfacial heat in mechanical seals, they include the design of seal rings with an internal heat exchanger, surface texturing techniques to improve heat transfer, and the design of a new generation of seals with a heat pipe.

Multilevel Diffuser Augmented for Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine

Indonesia is an area with the low and fluctuating wind speed. Therefore, the implementation of the wind turbine to generate electricity become ineffective and economically unprofitable. Diffuser Augmented Wind Turbine (DAWT) is the augmentation technology in wind turbine which could increase wind speed flow that arrives on the turbine blade. The working principle of the diffuser is to create a difference in pressure inside and outside the diffuser. The pressure inside the diffuser is lower than the pressure outside so that the wind will be accelerated into the diffuser and wind speed will dramatically increase at the inlet of the diffuser. This study will be presenting a modified design of diffuser augmented wind turbine (DAWT) by designing multilevel diffuser with additional inlet curvature and flange. This research aims to evaluate the amplification of flow velocity profile around the diffuser that has been engineered. The numerical study is performed using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) to obtain the highest ratio of speed increment. The verification of numerical initial condition is validated by comparing the result of validation with experimental data available in the literature. The result shows that a ratio of increase in speed is 2.08 times higher than conventional wind turbine over 4 m/s inlet velocity. In the equation of a wind power output, the wind speed is proportional to the cubic power of its wind power output. Therefore, the utilization of dual-stage diffuser device in wind turbine would give significant increment on the power output of wind turbine.